Salon 94 pairs two LA based artists, Amy Bessone and Matthias Merkel Hess this summer. Both artists present delightfully new and strangely familiar works. The Torsos by Bessone and Buckets by Merkel Hess both use the empty vessel as blank canvas for painting, and as containers that lack. Humor and play of utility and futility of a body is embedded in their work. Referring to standard types, the torsos and buckets are hand-made, imperfect and idiosyncratic constructions. Bessone’s work deals directly with the space the female body takes up, and the female body as a cultural construction. Merkel Hess deals deftly and concretely with our physical relationship to everyday utility objects.

Amy Bessone is known for her oil on canvas paintings of female forms, from abstracted outlines with mask-like faces, to figurative “portraits” of small figurines rendered larger than life, to bodies dis-assembled to flat puzzle-like pieces. Her persistent development of the female figure as fetish, construction and a site for looking has here evolved into sculptural form. Bessone’s six slightly over-scale female torsos, installed on knotted plywood vary in shape, size, and glaze. Bessone strips down her palette to variations on black and white. The Ruben-esque busts bulge imperfectly, painted graphically to highlight T&A.

The various ceramic “Bucketry” (the artist’s portmanteau of buckets plus pottery) of Matthias Merkel Hess – including buckets, trash cans, milk crates, gas cans, oil jugs, squatty pottys and more — is an homage to a history of labor. The plastic vessels turned sculptural objects can now be used for flowers instead of for paint or building materials. In changing their use-value he looks to the space inside. The modest utilitarian bucket is both Pop object and readymade. “Potters make pots and artists make art,” writes Leah Ollman, “if you cling to party-line thinking, which Merkel Hess does not. He messes with boundaries and adopts multiple causes. Utility and futility appeal to him equally and at the same time.”

Bessone (b. 1970, New York) completed her studies at De Ateliers, The Netherlands in 1995 and since then has mounted numerous exhibitions including solo shows at Veneklasen Werner, Berlin (2012), Praz-Delavallade, Paris (2011), David Kordansky Gallery (2010), among others. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Frac Bretagne, Chateaugiron, France, The Saatchi Collection, London, UK, Rennie Collection, Vancouver, Canada, and the Rubell Family Collection, Miami. She has had two solo exhibitions at Salon 94, and is slated for an upcoming solo show at Gavlak Gallery, Los Angeles next year.

Merkel Hess (b. 1978, Cedar Rapids) received his MFA from UCLA in 2010. Since then his work has been exhibited at Salon 94, New York, ACME, Los Angeles, Volume Gallery, Chicago, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, White Columns, New York and Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles, among many others. His work is included in the collections of Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, Cedar Rapids, IA, Hallmark Art Collection, Kansas City, MO, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, TX, and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS. The artist recently relocated from Los Angeles to New York City.

Salon 94 Freemans is located at 1 Freeman’s Alley off of Rivington Street. The gallery is open with summer hours Monday through Friday 11 am – 6 pm. For more information please call (212) 979 0001 or email info@salon94.com

BLANK SPACE is pleased to announce the second solo exhibition with the New York-based artist Antoinette Wysocki titled Wallflower at the new gallery space on 30 Gansevoort Street. Wysocki’s new series of paintings focus on the artist’s meditation on nature and its inherent language that incessantly entices viewers to decipher and emulate. Having studied and admired classical botanical drawings from the early years as an artist, Wysocki articulates her renewed fascination with nature’s brilliant harmonies and colors of the purest intensity, while dexterously narrating through signs, symbols, and words. The artist says, “Like a single flower demands our attention, the process within these pieces tell a similar story that await to be picked and adorned.”

Wysocki’s romanticized paintings feature the artist’s continuous engagement with the organic process that encourages dynamic interchange between various media like acrylic, ink, charcoal, pencil, gauche and watercolor. This spontaneous interaction and refraction on the surface of the canvas enact complex spatial and geometrical tension that is unique to the artist’s oeuvre.

Drawn inspiration from pop culture as well as the genre of classical paintings, the artist has incorporated visual devices such as words “look-up” or “OK” and symbols like birdcages or stars. Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, the emotionally charged pictorial plane is filled with subliminal icons awaiting to be discovered. In Together We Will Rise, the painting’s surface exhibits lush expressivity combined with intricate sensibility. The bleeding colors and the colliding lines encourage a sensory experience of the viewers.

Having received her BFA from San Francisco Art Institute, Antoinette Wysocki has exhibited her works widely in New York, London, Hong Kong, Dubai, and San Francisco.

On July 2, Katherine Hubbard and Savannah Knoop will begin work on Small Town Sex Shop, as part of Recess’s signature program, Session. Session invites artists to use Recess’s public space as studio, exhibition venue, and grounds for experimentation.

Over the course of their Session, Hubbard and Knoop will explore connotations of production through a synthesis of clothing-making, sculpture and installation. Perverting streamlined techniques of traditional garment-making determined by functionality and profit, the artists will scramble logics of efficiency in favor of excess and pleasure.

The accumulation of goods made in the space will begin to articulate a storefront; divisions will emerge from various materials in tension with themselves. With a carnivorous routine application of labor the structures that build the space initially will become the very forms that adorn the body.

The artists will work towards a collection of first samples, the phase within the design process when a garment transitions from it’s bastard self into a reproducible form. This work will use various techniques and explorations to produce sculptural forms made in relation to the body. These will be on view alongside a growing collection of modular straps made in multiple.

The strap pieces are intended to be worn in combination with street clothes and other experimental forms made throughout the Session. Visitors to the space will be encouraged to try on straps. However, wearability is not the primary concern of the work. The strap becomes a proposition: the mediator of boundaries and comfort as it binds the viewer’s body to the work.

Small Town Sex Shop considers notions of context— upon walking through the door of the “sex shop” in a “small town”, individuals can jettison their public identities in favor of a sexual sociality, obliging the roving body as it engages with it’s own shapes and desires.

The Session will culminate in the opening of a “store” in which visitors can try on and wear the straps and samples. Small Town Sex Shop makes room for inventive moments and awkward intimacy in the face of New York’s reliance on privatization.

In Drawing Waves, South African–born, German-based artist Robin Rhode will exhibit his signature, stop-action photographs (in which he draws in public streets and then a performer interacts with the inscribed image) in a new photographic sequence entitled, Breaking Waves, 2014-15, which whimsically depicts a young boy surfing in the sea. The illusionistic swell of the waves–articulated by Rhode’s drawn gestures onto a dilapidated city wall–reiterates the boy’s deft maneuvering of the ocean and this type of athletic physicality is echoed in the accompanying wall drawing Paries Pictus-Draw The Waves, 2015. Rhode will partner with a group of children aged 8-10 years to create this large-scale mural of the high seas, which will be video recorded and on view. He begins the process by attaching vinyl cutouts of seventeenth century mercantile ships to the gallery wall, and then invites the children to freely draw the surrounding body of water using giant, custom-made oil crayons. The nautical motif is largely inspired by the East India Company fleet, who were the first colonialists in Southern Africa—a nod to Rhode’s own childhood and the indignities he faced growing up in a post-apartheid South Africa. Yet as a participatory artwork, Rhode offers a more hopeful message by bringing urban youth culture to the fore and demonstrating the power of pure imagination.

Curated by Joanna Kleinberg Romanow, Adjunct Assistant Curator.

Robin Rhode: Drawing Waves is made possible by the Wagner Family Foundation and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. Special thanks to Allison and Larry Berg.

Shin Gallery is pleased to present the sincerely affecting and instinctual sketches of Keunmin Lee’s Trace the Empty Scene. Keunmin’s fluid, graphite lines angle and cull curious figures from the depths of his consciousness, banding an exotic amalgamation of life onto the blank page. Collectively, his idiosyncratic outlines caricature the curio cabinet of our innermost anxieties.

Trace the Empty Scene hinges on the surreal with its curious composition of humanoid subjects intimating proclivities that are not totally foreign to the human experience. The pathetic intensity imbued in these two-dimensional characters is enacted in their varying postures, disclosing an undercurrent of chronic disquiet. Keunmin’s frenetic smudges, partial erasures, and intentionally interrupted beings reflect an innate mastery for delineating imprecise figures of a psychological medium. The complexity of his subjects is elicited in their incongruous shapes, maintaining several identities upon the static page.

Keunmin’s figures range in their distinctive deformities, but still preserve a dignified charisma that suggests their misshapenness is a fault purely perceived by our self-conscious estimation, an act of “othering” our own self-identified flaws. However, in recognizing these mirror imperfections, there is compassion and hope to be found. Keunmin strips the clean veneer of composure and exposes our mutual vulnerabilities and insecurities in his coarse renderings, not out of spite or for shaming, but in an earnest attempt to forge reconciliation between others and within ourselves.

The ultimate duality of Empty Scene is conveyed in its liminal potential to be realized as both absurd and genuine. Keunmin is simply tracing what has always existed and commits it to the light of the page.

Krause Gallery will give emerging to established artists the opportunity to be in the gallery's group show as well as display new work by the gallery's established artists.

”We are encouraging all artists to explore a creative approach with their new works“. The exhibiting artists range from national to international with a broad range of mediums. From Ben Eines' iconic fonts to Ben Frosts' infamous package paintings, ”Emerging to Established" plans to capture a snapshot of the current contemporary art scene”.
The show runs from July 18th to September 6th.

“Craft occupies a key position in this process of continual unveiling.”
Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft

Emerging from a desire to explain the world around us, myth is a figment of what may or may not have been. Fantastical yet familiar, myth has the ability to reveal what is hidden and gives form to the inaccessible. Material exists in the concrete realm and like myth, frames our perspective. When manipulating tangible, raw substance into something new, an amount of alchemy is involved. The resulting entity loses characteristics of the parts that comprise it and takes on a gestalt of its own, rendering the materials mythical to the casual observer.

This exhibition brings five artists together whose work engages the relationship between myth and materials through processes based in various craft-related techniques. Utilizing the language of materials, these artists subvert and exploit the historical and socio-political associations that their media embodies. Through engaged experimentation, forms emerge from the activity of making. Speaking with the metaphorical qualities and palpable traits of their chosen materials, these artists join conversations with a long line of craft-based arts, sharing appreciation for the raw sensual appeal of these traditions. The approach artists take in Material Myth is very much in alignment with the Neo-Craftivism approach to artmaking, defined as a reinvigoration of Betsy Greer’s term Craftivism: a single word designed to merge craft and social activism, utilizing craft as a subversion. ‘Craft’, with all its connotations, is used as an escape-hatch, a means to think outside of the confines of contemporary art making.

Caroline Wells Chandler draws from personal experience, as well as the history of painting and gender politics. In an Ohio Interview with Amy Fusselman, Chandler stated, “The feminist art movement in the seventies really opened things up materially...It also laid down the foundation for identity politics based works in the nineties. I’m interested in body liberation, body language, word play, the way text informs and writes the way we navigate in our bodies, and how we use language to empower ourselves...Visually I want to expand language and twist the terms that currently exist. Crocheting as a process involves twisting lines which for me relates to language.”

The entry point to Rachael Gorchov’s work is the landscape of suburban, semi-public spaces: lawns, ponds, skies and flora, planned and invasive, that surround office and industrial complexes. She paints these elements with varying degrees of specificity, allowing image to collide, dissolve into and be convoluted by gestural abstraction. These three-dimensional forms made of papier-mache hang on the wall - the elements work in concert to defamiliarize omnipresent, ordinary environments. If you choose to spend time with these works, they will ask you to explore by walking, ducking and tilting your head.

Roxanne Jackson appropriates imagery from myth, horror films and subculture. She explores a variety of craft based materials to create work that is blackly humored and macabre. In the journal Eyes Towards the Dove, Sarah Walko wrote that her work generates a “...humorous dialogue between culturally accepted ideas of what is beautiful and what is beastly, what is banal and what is sublime. Her varied subjects compliment her varied mediums...striping a hierarchy of preciousness as they all integrate together creating a discordant tone. This use of materials also conceptually strengthens her critique of the glorification of popular culture as universal mythology.”

The history of connections between the industries of textiles and electronics provides inspiration for the work of Robin Kang. Utilizing a digitally operated Jacquard hand loom, the contemporary version of the first binary operated machine and argued precursor to the first computer, Robin hand weaves tapestries that combine ethnographic symbolism, computer related imagery, and digital mark making. These gestures, layered with symbols from ancient weaving traditions and motherboard hardware, blend together amid interlocking threads. The juxtaposition of textiles with technology opens an interesting conversation regarding the relationship between textiles, symbols, and language.

Meg Lipke’s recent body of work emerges from her painting practice while exploring objecthood and addressing the theme of reparation in a domestic setting. Her hybrid works draw not only from craft traditions but are also inspired by her family’s history in England’s textile industry. The work conjures ceremonial props that have been removed from context, and nods to the domestic/craft realm through the use of fabric, stuffing, cardboard, yarn and thread. With painterly gestures, she employs a traditional form of the textile application of batik (beeswax and fabric dye) to pattern and construct her compositions.

Since 1966, Niele Toroni (b. 1937, Muralto, Switzerland, lives and works in Paris) has applied imprints of a number 50 brush at regular intervals of 30 cm on a variety of surfaces and supports. For his first ever institutional solo show in NY and his first in the US in over 25 years, Swiss Institute presents an exhibition that spans close to 5 decades of the artist’s work, featuring imprints on waxed fabric, canvas, and paper, as well as new, site-specific works created for this show.

Throughout the years, Niele Toroni has remained steadfast in his practice of “Travail-Peinture,” in which the working method of applying paint in imprints of regular intervals delineates what is put on view. In a challenge to figurative painting, Toroni’s imprints subtly evidence human touch in the same moment that they obliterate the brushstroke as an emotive or psychological record. His works are metonymic interventions in the sense that the painted surface activates a space where the demarcation between container and contained is abolished. What is given to the viewer is an imprint of a number 50 paintbrush at regular intervals of 30 cm. No more, no less.

Explicitly emphasizing the elementary definition of painting, this simple application of pigment to surface marks a milestone in the history of conceptual art. Throughout his career, Niele Toroni has systematically questioned established methods of art-making, while irreverently challenging accepted notions of authorship and gently mocking the figure of the artist. Through his commitment to a systematic working process, he humbly attempts at liberating painting from its own representation.

Echoing Italian poet and novelist Cesare Pavese’s idea that the only joy in the world is to begin, Toroni’s work repeats itself in an eternal recommencement. Thus what may appear as a monolithic entity is actually a multitude of infinite variations. When confronted with the question of why continue to repeat his imprints, Toroni invariably responds: “You can look at the ocean everyday, but it is never the same sea.”

Swiss Institute thanks the lenders to the exhibition: The Museum of Modern Art, New York and Galerie Pietro Sparta, Paris.

SWISS INSTITUTE PROGRAMMING IS MADE POSSIBLE WITH PUBLIC FUNDS FROM PRO HELVETIA, SWISS ARTS COUNCIL, AND IN PART BY PUBLIC FUNDS FROM THE NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS AND THE NEW YORK STATE COUNCIL ON THE ARTS, WITH THE SUPPORT OF GOVERNOR ANDREW CUOMO AND THE NEW YORK STATE LEGISLATURE. MAIN SPONSORS INCLUDE LUMA FOUNDATION, FRIENDS OF SWISS INSTITUTE (FOSI), UBS AND VICTORINOX. SWISS INSTITUTE GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGES SWISS AS TRAVEL PARTNER, AND CHELSEA HOTELS AS HOSPITALITY PARTNER. SPECIAL THANKS FOR SUPPORT FOR THE EXHIBITION FROM THE NIELE TORONI EXHIBITION CIRCLE: THE REPUBLIC AND CANTON OF TICINO – FONDO SWISSLOS, MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY, HERMAN DALED, SYLVIE WINCKLER, AND THOSE WHO WISH TO REMAIN ANONYMOUS.

Demonstrating his immeasurable influence on contemporary painting, “Albert Oehlen: Home and Garden” will feature paintings from several of his most important bodies of work. In the 1970s, Oehlen studied in Hamburg with Sigmar Polke and joined the circle of artists associated with the painter Jörg Immendorff. Oehlen came to prominence in Germany in the early 1980s alongside his friends and frequent collaborators Martin Kippenberger, Georg Herold, and Werner Büttner, participating in a general return to painting taking place internationally at the time. At the very beginning of his career, Oehlen set himself the task of exploring the language, structures, and experiences of painting. His work has oscillated between figuration and abstraction, a dynamic that Oehlen constantly renews through the creation of rules and limitations that yield unpredictable results. Through this process, he has managed to reinvigorate seemingly exhausted genres of painting like portraiture, collage, and gestural abstraction. His work encapsulates both a skepticism of and faith in painting in the face of shifting critical positions and technological innovations.

The imagery and range of techniques that Oehlen has deployed throughout his career are staggering. His canvases capture haunting interiors, mutating self-portraits, archaic and digital landscapes, cryptic fragments of language, and abstractions enlivened by myriad chromatic and stylistic variations. Across all of his work, Oehlen displays an experimental and intuitive approach to painting infused with a refreshingly irrational sensibility inspired by a variety of influences, including punk and Surrealism. In recent years, as a younger generation of artists has turned again to painting as a critical medium, Oehlen’s work has only become more influential and prescient.

“Albert Oehlen: Home and Garden” will include a selection of the artist’s early self-portraits, his computer paintings and switch paintings from the 1990s, and more recent works fusing appropriated advertising signage and aggressive brushstrokes. Rather than following a chronological path through Oehlen’s prodigious thirty-year career, the exhibition explores contrasts between interior and exterior, nature and culture, and irony and sincerity, while also demonstrating Oehlen’s commitment to continually expanding the language of painting in surprising ways.

Albert Oehlen was born in 1954 in Krefeld, Germany. He studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst in Hamburg, Germany, and has exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the United States. Oehlen has been the subject of solo exhibitions at a number of international institutions, including the Museum Wiesbaden, Germany (2014); Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna (2013); Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2012); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2009); Arnolfini, Bristol, and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2005); Kunsthalle Basel (1997); IVAM Centre del Carme, Valencia, Spain (1996); the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (1995); and Kunsthalle Zurich (1987). He has participated in many major group exhibitions, including the 2013 Venice Biennale. Oehlen was Professor of Painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2000 to 2009. He currently lives and works in Switzerland.

The exhibition is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Artistic Director and Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator.

Ends September 27th 2015

Visitors, the next series of exhibitions comprising Art CommissionsGI, the Trust for Governors Island’s public art program, features the work of nine contemporary artists using multiple artistic platforms including performance, visual arts, interactive technology and written pieces to create experiences for Island visitors.

The artists in Visitors descend on Governors Island to create New York City inspired fictions. The historical site of the Island operates as a backdrop that emphasizes the imagined space of the City; it is a location that encourages fantasy and parody, a free space nestled in the harbor between Lower Manhattan and Red Hook, Brooklyn under the watchful gaze of the Statue of Liberty – a place of escape and the imaginary. The artists in Visitors consider this fact through absurdity, cheap tricks, and science fantasy narratives. Through their works, Governors Island becomes an alternate reality, one continuously shifting between its historical past as a military base, current use as a public park, and its potential future.
Visitors is both an exhibition of public interventions and an artist publication available online and in hard copy for a nominal fee of $1 at various sites throughout the Island. The artists’ publication provides a double-take on mapping the Island and the leisure activities that the journey anticipates with specially commissioned pages created by each of the nine selected artists. It also guides an actual and imagined experience within the Island, with artist contributions that refer to onsite works, as well as those that only exist within the psychological spaces created within its pages.

Participating artists:

Darren Bader has staged a professional photo shoot on the island, creating high-fashion images that feature models in various poses suggestive of activity on the island, such as catching fish through their earrings, lounging in baths and beds with the iconic Statue of Liberty in the background, and digging up the sidewalk in a nod to the island as a place under construction. Only slightly awry, the images comprise a luxurious public campaign for ways to use the island.
Nina Beier has plastered the disused swimming pool with a stock photo, physically affixing one surreal image onto another that exists in reality.
Peter Fischli and David Weiss have sent a moon rock, “Kling Klong” that plays wind chimes, a kind of new-age accouterment to the historic landmark of Castle Williams.
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster presents a comprehensive list of science fiction novels that will be made freely available to park visitors, offering ways to prepare for the future, suggesting Governors Island as a place of escape and refuge during an impending disaster.
Ajay Kurian has replaced the cups used by the vendors on the island with those carrying the logo of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement; a group dedicated to fixing environmental issues through voluntary extinction of the human race. The cups carry the complexity of human-centric apocalyptic narratives, as well as beverages. Kurian also shows a series of sculptures comprised of children’s pools and containing alternate worlds inside.
Rachel Rose has created different maps that guide a passageway through the island, they are catered to your role within the scene, choose protagonist, sidekick or skeptic, just a few of the characters available.
Aki Sasamoto has created a photo essay for the publication around holes, and trying to fit in.
Pilvi Takala has created Invisible Friend, based on her research on similar smart phone apps, which allow you to engage in a fictional relationship through a texting service.To sign up for Invisible Friend, send (any) text message to 1-347-926-3411 and your invisible friend will text you back when you have left the Island and can start a conversation. The service is free apart from paying your carrier for what you pay for SMS. All information, including phone numbers, shall be treated as confidential

Axelle’s Summer Group Show features a rotating selection of works from our roster of international figurative artists and introduces Ukrainian sculptor Julia Levitina to the gallery.

In the main gallery, we currently have paintings from Benoît Trimborn, Albert Hadjiganev and Ġoxwa and sculptures by Quentin Garel and new Axelle artist Julia Levitina. Levitina, born in 1981 in the Ukraine, creates elegant figurative works in terra cotta and bronze. She is involved in every step of her craft from the original molding in clay to the casting of the works and the patination. Her current collection includes nudes, busts and animals in bronze. Read more about the artist in her visiting artists blog post.

Trimborn’s new works include lush and textured land and seascapes. Hadjiganev paints his home, garden and studio in France with broad brushstrokes and thick layers of paint. Maltese painter Ġoxwa presents stunning figurative pieces as well as images of her hometown,Valletta. All three painters use vibrant colors and unusual textures to depict the natural world.

In the viewing room, we have stunning cityscapes of New York City and Paris from Patrick Pietropoli.

Further activating The Drawing Center's newly designed exhibition spaces, each year an artist will be invited to create a wall drawing in the gallery’s main entryway and stairwell. The Center continues this initiative in April 2015 with a commission by contemporary artist Abdelkader Benchamma (b. 1975, Mazamet, France).

Abdelkader Benchamma will create an astrological vortex in his strikingly graphic, site-specific drawing Representation of Dark Matter (2015). Rendered in intensely black lines against the wall’s white surface, the work is a painstaking depiction of the complexity of the solar system and its nearly imperceptible dark matter. The physically expansive image consists of swirling masses of lines that resemble scientific illustrations of the Big Bang and allude to explosive cosmic forces. Benchamma’s monochromatic use of such drawing tools as felt-tip pens, ink, and charcoal create a subtle array of tones and textures. In addition to the highly articulated drawing, the piece comprises a wooden construction adorned with collages from pages of old astronomy encyclopedias, symbolizing the structured scaffolding on which our universe is built. As an occult mapping of time and space, the installation gives form to that which is infinitely large and perpetually transforming.